140 THE REAL BERNARD SHAW
their private life private. How different from many modern
briefly famous men and women, who, in an age when
nothing succeeds like publicity, eagerly expose to the
public gaze the details of their domestic life, knowing that
the more unsavoury these are the higher the price they can
charge for admission to view them.
What sort of man was it that Charlotte Frances Payne-
Townshend, six months her husband's junior, led to the
registrar of marriages ?
Physically, to take the simpler matters first, he was
noticeable in any company. It was not his beard, for with
the Heir to the Throne and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury
setting the example, beards were not unfashionable in the
nineties. It was rather its colour, a true Scottish red, and
the combination of it with a pair of up-tilting eyebrows and
two tufts of hair sprouting from his fine high forehead.
The result was a combination of Mephistopheles and Pan.
His nose, big and blunt, gave the impression of a man who
is well able and even anxious to stand up to blows; not a
foxy nose, or in any sense a retreating one, but a pug-
nacious nose, and the reverse of finely chiselled. Then,
unlike the donkey, Shaw, has plenty of head above the ears.
These, also red, 'are a Shaw speciality,' explains their owner,
delightedly describing them with a kind of Dickensian
exaggeration. 'They stick straight out like the doors of a
triptych; and I was born with them full-size, so that on
windy days my nurse had to hold me by the waistband to
prevent my being blown away when the wind caught them/
Prattling, away thus in a letter to Ellen Terry, Bernard
Shaw passes that final and most acid test for sense of
humour—an ability to laugh at oneself. And the eyes?
Blue and self-conscious. A pair of imps; chameleons;
much of their thunder stolen by the eyebrows trying to
assert their authority; an actor's eyes; windows of the mind
to show his thoughts, complete with blinds to conceal them;
piercing eyes, twinkling eyes, eyes that can look through
and sometimes past you. Place this head on a tallish, lean,
wiry, upright body, and if the picture is incomplete, the
world's photograph album will complete it.
As an object Shaw has been a much photographed, much